Copyright an aberration with a limited future

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There has been a tiny victory in the long battle against the
forces of darkness. A US Circuit Court of Appeals court has ruled
against the US Federal Communications Commission's requirement that
TV networks should use "flagging", a signal that would help prevent
programsbeing copied, in everything they broadcast.

The ruling means that digital material broadcast by free-to-air
TV stations can continue to be copied. Flagging technology would
have made this more difficult, because it would have mandated the
inclusion of anti-copying technology in consumer technology such as
digital video recorders.

Proponents of flagging - the TV networks and the Hollywood
studios - have criticised the ruling and vowed to fight on, even if
it means making existing draconian copyright laws even more severe.
It is these people's strategy to wear down their opponents with
endless litigation, bleeding them dry with all manner of expensive
lawsuits and appeals, and changing laws on the run as technology
outsmarts them.

The industry, always ready to cloak its self-interest in
altruism, claims that the ruling will make the so-called "digital
divide" deeper by creating two classes of consumer, saying that the
"non-secure" broadcast medium will have lower-quality programming
than "secure" outlets.

This line of argument (it is impossible to call it reasoning) is
typical of these people. They pretend they have the consumers'
interests at heart, when all they want to protect is their own
privileged position. They cannot see that copyright is dead in the
information age. Technology has rendered it so.

Copyright laws operate against the interests of consumers and
most artists. They mostly benefit the middlemen in the music, film
and publishing industries. It is these people who are directly
responsible for the predominance of junk served up on the screen
and over the airwaves. They seek to extend their temporary control
of content and how it is distributed for as long as they can.

The concept of copyright was developed to protect printers in
17th-century England, and was greatly strengthened by the film and
music industries and wealthy publishing companies in the US over
the past 50 years. But digital technology, and the ease with which
all media can now be stored, copied and propagated, has rendered
these antiquated and anachronistic laws increasingly
unenforceable.

Proponents of copyright, who are fortunately dwindling in
number, often use the spurious argument that without copyright
there would be nothing to protect artists' rights, and that
creativity would die. This argument pretends that copyright is the
natural order of things, when it is an aberration in human
history.

The greatest writers, composers and artist of the classical era
operated with no copyright protection at all. That never stopped
Shakespeare writing, or Bach composing, or Michelangelo painting.
The difference is that all these artists, and most others, worked
on a performance-based model - create the work, get paid once, move
on to the next one.

That is still the way most musicians, writers and painters make
their living today. The proportion that get a significant amount of
their income from royalties is minuscule. The real money goes to
the "industry" that has grown up to extract money from consumers
through a complex distribution system that digital technology has
now rendered irrelevant.

There is a tie-in to my column last week about Apple and its
many corporate mistakes. I wrote about how Apple has come down
heavily on some harmless bloggers who committed the unpardonable
sin of letting out some Apple product secrets on their website. I
mentioned this as another example of Apple's thin skin.

But one of the world's leading IT columnists, the well-informed
and entertaining Robert X. Cringely, believes Apple has done this
largely so it appears to the film and music industries that it is
strong on the protection of so-called "intellectual property". Not
so long from now Apple will start distributing films through its
iTunes service (wait for "iMovies") in a similar cosy arrangement
it now has with record companies, and it wants to help the
distributors protect their turf.

Cringely expands on Apple's iTune and iPod policy in his column this week.

He makes the point that Apple is using the iPod as a razor, and
is making most of its money from the blades (iTunes downloads).
Apple's business model is based on being the sort of middleman
whose role I believe is limited as technology evolves. Proprietary
"services" and proprietary platforms are not the way of the future.
Could this end up being another of Apple's mistakes?

· Note that I made an elementary error in my column last
week. I said that Wiley, which has been banned from Apple Stores
because of its release of an unauthorised biography of Apple boss
Steve Jobs, is publisher of the Complete Idiot's Guide series. That
is incorrect. Wiley's series is called the For Dummies series. The
Complete Idiot's Guides are published by Alpha Books, a division of
Penguin.